Edward Snowden’s revelations about the vast and illegal American electronic
surveillance and spying operations inside the US and internationally have
punctured the propaganda propagated by the Obama administration to justify
its aggressive “pivot to Asia” aimed against China.

The US cynically
presents itself as a force for regional stability, peace and “human rights”
and the leader of Asian democracies—Japan, India and Australia—against the
bullying of autocratic China. Under this guise, Washington has waged a
determined offensive throughout the region to strengthen strategic
alliances, build up military forces and consolidate trade ties in a bid to
undermine Beijing’s influence.

In the lead-up to the recent summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping,
the Obama administration mounted a concerted campaign aimed at branding
China as the number one “cyber threat” to the US and the world. A Pentagon
report last month directly accused the Chinese government and military of
large-scale cyber intrusions into American government, military and
corporate computer networks. During the summit, Obama provocatively declared
that alleged Chinese cyber espionage was the “direct theft of US property.”

In reality, as Snowden’s exposure of NSA operations confirms, the US
military and intelligence apparatus has built up the world’s largest and
most advanced cyber warfare machine, which it aggressively uses against the
American people and any country regarded as a current or potential threat to
the interests of American imperialism.

As Beijing has repeatedly alleged, China is a prime target. Snowden
presented specific evidence to the South China Morning Post in Hong
Kong last week that the NSA had hacked into hundreds of civilian computers
in Hong Kong and China since 2009, including Hong Kong’s Internet Exchange,
which handles all of the city’s web traffic. Having gained access to network
backbones, the agency could gather information from hundreds of thousands of
computers.

“The primary issue of public importance to Hong Kong and mainland China
should be that the NSA is illegally seizing the communications of tens of
millions of individuals without any individualised suspicion of wrongdoing.
They simply steal everything so they can search for any topics of interest,”
Snowden warned.

American intelligence expert Matthew Aid provided further confirmation of
the NSA’s massive cyber operations against China in an article last week in
Foreign Policy. He revealed that the US has been engaged in
large-scale hacking of Chinese computer and telecommunications networks for
the past 15 years.

Aid also exposed the existence of a highly secretive unit within the
NSA’s Signal Intelligence Directorate known as the Office of Tailored Access
Operations (TAO). The TAO, he said, employs 1,000 military and civilian
hackers, analysts and engineers. Not only has it produced “some of the best
and most reliable intelligence” about China, he stated, but it has been
tasked with assembling the information needed for the US “to destroy or
damage foreign computers and telecommunications systems with a
cyber-attack.”

These revelations expose the Obama administration’s lies that the NSA
spying is to protect the US from terrorist attack. The criminality of the
American cyber operations against China is rooted in the imperialist
character of the entire policy of the “pivot to Asia.” The US is determined
to use its military might to prevent any challenge from China’s economic
rise to its dominance in Asia since the end of World War II.

The NSA’s massive cyber operations are intimately bound up with US
preparations for war against China. High-level US intelligence sharing with
close allies in Asia goes hand in hand with establishing new military basing
arrangements with Australia, Singapore and the Philippines, restructuring
and reinforcing existing US bases in Japan, South Korea and Guam, and
building up anti-ballistic missile systems in the region as part of
Washington’s nuclear war plans.

The US has encouraged allies such as Japan and the Philippines to take a
more assertive stance against China, heightening tensions in maritime
disputes in the East China Sea, South China Sea and other regional
flashpoints. By elevating the alleged cyber threat posed by China,
Washington is preparing the pretext for a provocative cyber attack that
risks escalating into a wider conflict. The Obama administration has already
claimed the right to launch pre-emptive cyber attacks—as it has already done
against Iran’s nuclear program.

In the wake of the NSA revelations, the American media and political
establishment have launched an all-out campaign to vilify Snowden for
exposing the NSA’s criminal operations at home and abroad. The latest lie
that he might be a double-agent working for the Chinese government is
particularly sinister, given the Obama administration’s history of targeted
assassinations of US citizens.

The fact that Snowden fled to Hong Kong, a Chinese territory, is not
evidence that he is a spy, but rather of the collapse of basic legal and
democratic norms in the United States and all of its allies in Europe, Asia
and around the world. As the illegal NSA spying on US citizens demonstrates,
the differences between American “democracy” and the Chinese police state
are rapidly narrowing. The class logic is the same. Just as the Chinese
government is preoccupied with suppressing social unrest, so the US
financial oligarchy regards the American people as a threat to its vast
wealth and privileges.

The defence of Edward Snowden is an urgent issue not only for workers in
America, but in Asia and internationally. He is being targeted for exposing
the extent of the intelligence apparatus that has been established by the US
to prosecute war against its international rivals and suppress domestic
opposition to its austerity agenda at home.

The drive towards war and dictatorial forms of rule is rooted in the
breakdown of the profit system, which has produced sharpening geo-political
tensions between rival capitalist powers and growing opposition and
resistance in every country to the relentless assault on the social position
of the working class. The defence of democratic rights can be realised only
through a unified socialist movement of the international working class to
abolish capitalism. This means the building of sections of the International
Committee of Fourth International, the world Trotskyist movement, throughout
Asia and around the world.